e."

"Am I to bring up my own boy to swear that he was there, witnessing
what was done, as the friend of my enemies? I do not believe that he
was there at all."

"If you question him, he will probably own to it. It will be better
to get at the truth and face it. He is only ten years old. You must
tell me the story of his pretended conversion."

"Why should it be pretended?" asked the father.

"Well; of his conversion," said Edith.

"I don't see what it has to do with it? Am I to put myself forward as
a bigoted Protestant? Florian has been foolish, but am I to say that
I am angry, where I am not angry--not specially angry."

"It will show the influence under which he has taken up Carroll's
side," said Edith.

"Or the influence under which he has been made to hold his tongue,"
said Ada.

"Just so," said Edith. "We do not think that he has made one with
your enemies in the matter. But he has seen them at work and has been
made to promise that he will hold his tongue. I don't suppose you
mean to let the affair slip by without punishing any one."

When the girls left him, Mr. Jones was by no means persuaded. As
far as he could ascertain from examination of the persons about the
locality, there was no one willing to state in evidence that he
had seen anything. The injury had been done in November, on a wet,
dreary, dull afternoon. He did learn that at half-past three the
meadows were in their usual condition. As to the sluices, the gates
of which had been pulled out and thrown away in twenty different
places, he could learn nothing; no one had seen a sluice gate
touched. As to Florian, and what Florian had been seen to do, he
had asked no question, because Florian's name had not then been
mentioned. But he had been struck by the awful silence of the people.
There were women there, living on the spot, with whose families
his family had been on the most kindly terms. When rheumatism
was rife,--and rheumatism down on the lough side had often been
rife--they had all come up to the Castle for port wine and solace. He
had refused them nothing,--he, or his dear wife, who had gone, or his
daughters; and, to give them their due, they had always been willing
to work for him at a moment's notice. He would have declared that no
man in Ireland was on better terms with his tenantry than he; and
now, because there had been a quarrel between him and that pestilent
fellow Carroll,--whom he had been willing to buy out from his bit